My trainticketart on ceramics – but first – New stickers for Autumn/Halloween!

So far, I have only sold planner stickers in my Etsy shop but yesterday I grouped five of them (including the halloween ones) into one package and am selling it on Creative Market.

5 sets of planner stickers in contrasting colours

To reflect the trend for bigger, brighter photos in blogs, I have also rewritten my tutorial How To Make A Concertina Book and replaced the photos with better, larger and hopefully clearer ones.

And so to the ceramics…

If you’ve been following me on Facebook or Instagram, you’ll know that I have some of my trainticketart in another Diverse Manners exhibition in the Riverfront Arts Centre in Newport for the next 3 weeks – but it is a bit different this time. When we were in France (see previous post), we were staying near Limoges, a famous porcelain making area, so of course we had to visit one of the factory shops!

I bought ten white porcelain door plates which I thought would be great to put some of my train ticket art on to. This was my process:

I scanned the artwork into my computer at a high resolution (1200dpi). I selected 10 of these, cropped to the correct size. I then boosted the levels in Photoshop to enhance the colour saturation and placed them all together on one A3 sized document. There was some space left so I added a tile sized piece and some strips to fill the sheet completely. You pay for a whole A3 sheet so you might as well get as many ceramics as possible!

I then uploaded it to Digital Ceramics in Stoke on Trent (my home town). They printed it on ceramic decals and sent it back to me within 3 days. I was very impressed with their service!

I took the sheet and the porcelain doorplates to my friend Fiona at Barefoot Ceramics. She is a fellow member of Diverse Manners. She showed me how to float the decals off the backing paper and smooth them over the doorplates and tiles. This done, she fired them for me. They were a great success and I think look impressive as ceramics.

To exhibit them, I screwed them on to a wooden baton that I’ve painted to look like weather worn seaside fences.

Here are some photos of the results. I used several train tickets which have a beach hut theme. Screwing them to the batons was the hardest part!

See the chaos on my work table? Screwing things isn’t my strong point! Blood, sweat and tears is more to the point.

The exhibition is on until 22 October. We have an open afternoon this Saturday 8 October from 2pm to 4pm to meet the artists. If you are in the area or fancy a trip to South Wales, do pop in and introduce yourself. You can see some of the other artwork on the Diverse Manners Facebook page.

Here they are hanging in the gallery in the Riverfront. To the left are the original train tickets (I had to rush home to get another to fill the gap!). To the right are the tiles in box frames.

I’m still making my train ticket art! I have been posting photos on Instagram pretty regularly and here are a few of them.

A collage of some of my most recent train ticket art

Additionally, Pattern Observer kindly wrote a post about it back in September. I meant to mention it then but was in Australia without much signal at the time. In it I spoke about the process and how I have managed to keep it going for so long.

The grand reopening of my Etsy shop selling digital downloads is happening today, Saturday 14th November!! To celebrate, I’m offering 20% discount on everything in the shop just for this weekend, 14th and 15th November. I’d love you to take a look! The code you’ll need is 20414 – at the checkout before payment, you click on ‘Apply shop coupon code’ and type it in the box that appears. If you need any help with this, go to Etsy’s help page for coupon codes.

Here is a sneak peek at one of the kits:

I had an inky time earlier this week splashing round India ink to make some more papers! Great fun, but very messy…

In this photo there are several tickets which I placed on my gelli plate to keep them from moving. I then used a hand made bunting stamp on them. I will add details to each one to finish it off.

Lots of tickets all lined up having background stamps added.

Background gelli print with red flower stamp on top.

Yellow bird

I drew this from rough sketch of a medieval tile in the British Museum (it’s supposed to be a deer!)

Colourful watercolour doodling!

This is a painting of a branch of wisteria

Another lacey design using texture from gelli print as background

The same red flower stamp as above (these things can be very versatile!) , plus part of a thermofax screen map partly covered by green paint

In addition to my trainticketart, I have been busy uploading some of my patterns and designs to Redbubble , which is a print on demand service where you can buy custom designs printed on to all sorts of media such as canvas, photographic prints as well as cushions, leggings, ipod cases and even duvet covers! I am planning to add more over the coming weeks so if one of my designs catches your eye, why not treat yourself? If you have seen one of my patterns online that isn’t in my shop yet, drop me a line and I’ll do my best to put it there. This could even include the trainticketart if I scan it in at a high enough resolution.

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Hello. My name's Liz Plummer and I'm an artist based in Newport, South Wales, UK, I love dyeing, printing, painting and stitching.
This blog is about the influences on my work, inspiration, my daily life,
and the processes of creating. Enjoy!